Malone turned his attention back to Dooley. “What is it that you want? Money?” He nodded as if, of course, it was. “It’s always about money, isn’t it?”
“You know what they say,” Dooley said. “You do the crime, you have to pay—one way or another.”
Malone seemed to like that. He raised his glass in a salute to Dooley, swallowed the rest of the scotch, and then he held the glass up, a signal for the waiter to bring him another one. “How much do you want?” he said.
“Twice what Jeffie asked for.”
“Twice?”
“Twice the crime, twice the price,” Dooley said.
“Twice the crime?” Malone said, amused. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but no one has established that I committed any crime at all.”
“That’s the point, right?” Dooley said. “You don’t want anyone to establish that.”
The waiter brought a fresh drink for Malone and took away the empty glass.
“You’re wasting your time and mine,” Malone said, swirling the ice in the amber liquid. “I’m not paying you anything. I have no reason to.” He leaned back in his chair, manicured, polished, smug.
“Even if you ditch that phone,” Dooley said, “there’s going to be a record somewhere of the number and the fact that it belonged to you. You can count on that. They’re going to find out that you knew her.”
“Knew who?” Malone said.
“Lorraine,” Dooley said.
“Lorraine?”
Dooley had to hand it to Malone; the guy gave away nothing. It was as if the name meant nothing to him.
“Lorraine McCormack. She had your cell phone number.”
Malone smiled. “A lot of people have my number.”
“And Lorraine was one of them. And someone killed her, in case you missed that on the news.”
Still nothing.
“That phone call you just got,” Dooley said. “That was a friend of mine. I gave him your number. Lorraine had it written in a book—she drew a little heart around it.”
Malone laughed. “So?”
“She was cleaning herself up,” Dooley said. “She was getting her life together. I talked to her sponsor, you know, from the meetings she used to go to. She said she thought Lorraine was doing it for a guy. She was doing it for you, right?”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“Cut the crap,” Dooley said, louder than he had intended, loud enough that a couple of suits at the next table turned in his direction. “Jeffie saw you with her.” Sunday night on the late news, for the first time in his life, Jeffie had set eyes on Lorraine. He didn’t know she was Dooley’s mother. But he did know that he’d seen her before, back behind Jay-Zee’s with his downtown guy who worked in the gold office building. “That’s what this is all about—Lorraine.”
Malone glanced around. Maybe to the people at the tables around them he looked calm, unruffled. But Dooley saw the tightness around his mouth when he smiled.
“You said there were no pictures,” Dooley said. “But you’re wrong. There’s one. You give me a hard time, you try to bullshit me, you don’t tell me what I want to know, and I’ll take my story and that picture to the cops and they’ll be all over you, making their case and making your life miserable while they do. I can guarantee it.”
“What picture?” Malone said.
“A picture of you and her”—he was going to say, and me, but he couldn’t make his mouth form the words. “From sixteen or seventeen years ago.” He waited to see if Malone would make the connection. If he did, he didn’t show it. “You knew her. You dumped her. And she was trying to get her act together again so she could be with you. Am I right?”
Malone said nothing.
“Am I right?” Dooley said, raising his voice again. This time more people turned to looked at him. “You answer my questions or I walk—now.”
Malone took a sip of scotch.
“I heard what happened to her,” he said finally. He kept his voice low, soft, like a man trying to soothe a vicious dog before it decided to take a bite out of him. “And I’m sorry. Okay, yes, she contacted me. And, yes, I agreed to see her. But a lot of water had passed under the bridge. We were together for a few months, but that was a long time ago, and her life …” He shook his head.
“Did you love her?”
“What?”
“Did you love her?”
“Is that important?”
Dooley surprised himself when he said, “It is to me.”
Malone contemplated his glass of scotch for a moment. “She was a fun girl but, no, I didn’t love her.”
“She loved you.”
“So she said. She was pretty intense, you know what I mean?”
He was talking to Dooley now like he knew for a fact that Dooley had known her, that she wasn’t just some woman he had seen once, like Jeffie had. Dooley wondered if Lorraine had talked about him.
“My situation wasn’t like hers,” Malone said. “I took a year off school, had some fun, but then I had to get on with life.”
“So you just split?” Dooley said, wondering if Malone would mention that there had been a child.
“Something like that.”
“Then what?”
Malone shrugged. “Then nothing—much. A few teary phone calls at the beginning. A few idle threats—”
“Threats?”
“She was going to hurt herself—or so she said.”
She’d managed that just fine.
“After that?”
“Nothing.”
“Until maybe six or seven months ago, right?” Dooley said.
Malone didn’t answer.
“Right?” Dooley said, raising his voice again.
“More like nine months ago,” Malone said. “We ran into each other. She made a fool of herself. I thought that was it. Then, somehow, she found out where my office was, and she called me. She showed up at my house, for Pete’s sake.”
“So you killed her?”
“No.”
“What was she doing with you behind Jay-Zee’s?”
“I told you,” Malone said, working now to stay smooth, but not doing well with it. Dooley was getting under his skin. “Jeffrey was mistaken. Lorraine had a substance abuse problem. She never did know when to stop. People like that are prone to overdose.”
“She used to cry about you.”
“I can’t help that.”
“She cleaned herself up for you.”
“I never asked her to. I never asked her to do anything for me.”
“It wasn’t right the way she died,” Dooley said. “It took the cops almost a whole day to even find out who she was.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Malone said. “The way she lived—that’s what it’s like down there. There are people who see a body lying half-naked behind a dumpster and what do they do? Do they call the police, like any normal person would do? No, they take her money, her wallet, any pills they find that they think they can sell. That’s the kind of people she hung around with.”
Dooley studied Malone while he thought about what he had just said.
“You know who I am, right?” he said.
“Some scumbag friend of Jeffrey Eccles,” Malone said.
Right.
“Did she put up a fight?” he said.
Malone stared evenly at him.
“They said there were bruises on her arms. Did she put up a fight?”
Nothing.
“I bet Jeffie did, though,” Dooley said.
“Look, you came to me for money—I’m sure we can come to some kind of agreement. You give me that picture of Lorraine and me. You forget she had my phone number. We can work it out. What do you say we get together tomorrow, somewhere a little more private, where we can do the exchange?”
“Now you want to pay me off, even though you weren’t behind Jay-Zee’s that night and you have nothing to do with what happened to her?”
“My clients pay me w
ell for my advice—for my reputation. It’s worth it to me to keep the police out of my life.”
“So you want to meet me and pay me and maybe do me like you did Jeffie?” Dooley shook his head. He started to get up.
“Be reasonable,” Malone said, soothing, very soothing. “You give me something I want, I give you something you want.”
“What does the D stand for?” he said.
“What?”
“The D—Ronald D. Malone. What does it stand for?”
Malone’s lips stretched into a smirk.
“David,” he said.
David. Not Dooley.
“She fed you a line, huh?” Malone said.
Apparently she had, not that Dooley minded, not now that he’d met the guy.
He glanced around and was surprised to see Randall coming past the maitre d’ so soon. He hadn’t been sure whether Warren would be able to get hold of him. But he had. Myers was right behind him. A couple of uniformed police officers followed. Forks and glasses paused in midair as people turned to watch them march through the dining room and stand at the opening to the booth where Dooley was sitting.
“Jeffie fought back,” Dooley said. “They have blood. They’re going to go for DNA.”
Malone sat where he was, but he wasn’t smiling anymore.
“Ronald Malone,” Detective Randall said. “We’d like to talk to you about Lorraine McCormack and Jeffrey Eccles.”
Dooley called Beth and told her he couldn’t meet her at seven o’clock after all because the police needed him to make a formal statement. He said it would help to get his uncle released.
“They found the person who did it?” Beth said.
“Yeah,” Dooley said. He knew he would eventually have to tell her who that person was. But when he did, it would be in person, not over the phone. “I’ll call you, okay?”
“Sure,” she said. “Tell your uncle I said hi.” There was a pause. “That sounds kind of lame, doesn’t it?”
“I’ll tell him you were asking about him. He’ll like that.”
Dooley’s uncle got out the next afternoon. The first thing he wanted to do was go home, take a shower, and put on some clean clothes. The next thing he wanted to do was cook what he called a decent meal. He wouldn’t let Jeannie or Dooley do a thing. He poured some wine for Jeannie and a Coke for Dooley and sat them down at the kitchen table. They could watch—in fact, he seemed to want them there, although he didn’t come right out and say so. He didn’t say anything about what had happened, either. He just cooked and drank wine and smiled at Jeannie, and then they all ate together. Dooley left them both in the living room while he cleaned up the kitchen. But his uncle didn’t stay there. He came into the kitchen and put on an apron to help Dooley.
“It’s okay,” Dooley said. “You stay with Jeannie.”
“Jeannie’s okay on her own for a little while,” his uncle said. He rinsed a couple of plates and put them in the dishwasher. He said, “Your friend Jeffrey could have saved everyone a lot of grief if he’d just come out and told you he saw Lorraine.”
“He didn’t know I knew her,” Dooley said. “He never met her.”
His uncle digested this. He rinsed some cutlery and put that in the dishwasher.
“About the money,” he said.
Dooley had the tap running, filling the sink with hot water so he could tackle the pots and the broiler pan. He turned it off and looked at his uncle.
“I wanted you to have a chance,” his uncle said. “The first time I went to see you, you were so messed up, you were practically climbing the walls. You remember that? And what you did—you were fifteen years old. When I was a kid, fifteen-year-old boys were out playing hockey or softball. They weren’t doing what you were doing. Getting locked up was probably the best thing that ever happened to you.”
Dooley wasn’t sure he’d go that far.
“I wanted her to stay away from you, that’s all,” his uncle said. “She’d made a mess of her life and yours. I didn’t want her to make things worse, not when it looked like you might have a chance. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this. Maybe you don’t want to hear it. But she was willing, Ryan. I didn’t exactly have to twist her arm to get her to take the money and stay the hell away from you.”
“She knew,” Dooley said. He had been chewing it over ever since he’d visited the cemetery. “You said they never told her about your sister, but she knew. I figure she found out when she was thirteen or fourteen.” Dooley explained about the picture he had found. “Did you tell her?”
“No.”
“You think maybe your parents did?”
“If they did, they never told me.” He looked hard at Dooley. “I have something for you, Ryan,” he said at last.
Dooley waited.
“It will have to wait until tomorrow, when the bank opens,” his uncle said.
Twenty-One
Dooley’s uncle came out of the bank with a manila envelope in his hand. Dooley watched him look both ways before darting out into a gap in the traffic and jogging over to the coffee shop where Dooley was waiting for him. He was breathing a little harder than normal when he dropped into the chair across from Dooley and eyed Dooley’s coffee.
“You want one?” Dooley asked.
His uncle shook his head.
“This is for you,” he said, handing Dooley the envelope.
Dooley hefted it, fingered it, but he couldn’t tell what was inside.
“I got a call,” his uncle said. “This goes back a couple of years. Some guy—it turned out he was a neighbor—tells me it’s a miracle she hadn’t done it already, the way she led her life.”
Done it? Done what? Dooley thought about asking, but decided against it. His uncle would get to it. It was better to let him tell it in his own way.
“The paramedics said it looked like it was mostly for show,” his uncle said. “A nice big gash, but not deep. She was out cold, but it wasn’t from blood loss. It was the booze and the pills. She didn’t have enough of either in her system to do the job, though.”
Some show, Dooley thought.
“The fire, though—if the neighbor hadn’t smelled something, that might have done the trick,” his uncle said. “She might have taken a few people with her, too.”
Jesus, after everything that had happened, he still hadn’t heard one good word about Lorraine. Her life was misery after misery, a real fuckup.
“Those were scattered around,” his uncle said said, nodding at the envelope. He stopped talking then, and Dooley understood that he was supposed to open it.
There were more envelopes inside. Letters. Half a dozen—no—nine. Nine letters. One was addressed to Lorraine at a post office box Dooley had never heard of. The other eight were addressed to someone named Patrick Ryan Dooley. Dooley glanced up at his uncle, but his face gave nothing away.
Dooley picked up the envelope addressed to Lorraine and opened it. There was another envelope inside. Like the other eight, it was addressed to Patrick Ryan Dooley. Unlike the other eight, this one had been opened and its contents presumably read before it was put back into its envelope, sealed in a second envelope, and mailed back to Lorraine. Dooley pulled out the two sheets of paper—pink—and unfolded them. He skimmed the letter and then went back and read it again slowly. He checked the date. He’d been six months old when it had been written.
He refolded the sheets, put them back into the envelope, and laid it flat on the table. He picked up the other eight envelopes—still sealed after all these years—and lined them up according to the dates on the postmarks.
Nine envelopes in all, and what a story they told.
“She always said I had my dad’s name,” he said.
His uncle didn’t say anything.
In fact, he had Lorraine’s father’s name—her birth father. Her birth mother, according to the first letter, written by Lorraine, had died right after Lorraine was born.
Lorraine had originally registered Dooley as Ryan Dooley McCorm
ack. Then, when she finally had an address to go along with the name she’d managed to find, she’d had his name legally changed. She’d dropped the McCormack and made him Ryan Dooley. Then she’d written that first letter to her father in loopy girlish handwriting, telling him all about herself and her little boy, telling him, “I can’t wait until he meets his grandpa.” He pictured her waiting for the reply, checking her mail box every day, antsy and anxious, until finally she’d opened the box and found an envelope addressed to her. The envelope she had been waiting for. But when she opened it—not a word from her father. No, just her letter, returned without a word of acknowledgment.
Seven more letters had all been returned unopened, the words, “Return to Sender,” scrawled across them, the pen biting into the paper of the envelope.
The final letter, also unopened, had also been returned, but this time the envelope had been stamped “Moved—Address Unknown.” That was the end of the correspondence.
Dooley imagined how confused she must have felt when she found out about the first Lorraine. She’d acted out over that discovery. She’d also begun the search for her real parents—and look how that had turned out.
He stacked the letters and slipped them back into the manila envelope.
“To give her some credit, she must have really worked at finding him,” his uncle said. “The records were sealed. It couldn’t have been easy for her to track him down.”
And there it was—the first positive thing Dooley had ever heard his uncle say about Lorraine.
“You said you found these when … you said it was a few years back,” he said.
“Two years ago this past June.”
“Around the time I was arrested that last time,” Dooley said.
“Turns out it was the day after,” his uncle said.
“Turns out?”
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